How realistic is it for Samsung to become a global leader in device innovation?

Two recent conversations lead me to believe that enterprises are far more serious about 3D printing than might be apparent from reading the business press.

The first conversation was with a global transportation manufacturer. Imagine their historical position - they won RFPs, signed a contract, got a revenue advance and then started to build trains, trams or metros. Easy - most development costs were paid by the customer.

Today there are no cash advances. They must fund development and production, as well as offer to support local businesses in the process.Enter 3D printing, at the very least to help build up local parts suppliers.

There is no other game in town for companies that make this type of product. The move to APIs and open systems could be a decade away - all the way down a tortuous road where they will have to help set global standardization policies for inter-train communications.

In the meantime innovation is all about laying off responsibility and risk to suppliers.

That reminds me of Nokia and its view of the future - help stimulate, create and foster independent local production facilities, let them do the dirty work and the customer interaction, and sell IP into them.

Nokia is some years away from having a new supply ecosystem based around 3D printing but it makes perfect sense to float the idea and take a de-risked approach to attempting it, starting with the shell.

Mobile supply chains are now so complex that Apple is being forced to onshore some manufacture to reduce its exposure to supply chain disruption.

That brings me to the second conversation, with a leading supply chain insurer who told me that they had a problem. They had their systems adapted to periodic events like Hurricane Sandy, but events were beginning to overlap - say an invasion (Mali) and bad weather (Europe gridlocked). The insurance industry will find it extremely difficult to deal with multiple simultaneous events.

That's another way of saying that supply chains are now too complex to manage within an increasingly unpredictable global environment.

“….when Samsung first unveiled the Galaxy Note—a 5.3-inch smartphone that was big enough to be a minitablet, hence the ugly portmanteau—the world’s tech pundits couldn’t stifle their giggles. Was it a phone? Was it a tablet? Was it a joke? Smartphone industry blog Boy Genius Report called the Note “the most useless phone I’ve ever used,” adding: “You will look stupid talking on it, people will laugh at you, and you’ll be unhappy if you buy it.” Gizmodo argued that the Note “isn’t just designed poorly—it’s hardly even designed for humans….Confounding our predictions, Samsung sold 10 million Notes in 2012, making it one of the most successful smartphone launches in history. Then, in the fall, Samsung launched the Galaxy Note II, an upgraded version with an even larger screen—and it promptly sold 5 million of them, and is on track to sell 20 million over the course of the year.

We felt it was these two together than explained success. Design can be perpetually good but markets move on and the virtues of the iPhone will not persist. That can be solved quickly, however. Apple could enter the new large screen size mobile market and will inevitably enjoy success, though will also diminish its reputation for innovation.

What it really needs to do is make a systemic innovation to match the apps developer community of 2008 vintage. The apps community created the excitement around the iPhone, allowed Apple to scale its market and de-risked growth.

But the current trend is too non-Apple. Delegating production to new local producers who can customize the Apple form factor or interface? Or creating an independent hardware ecosystem? These are too big a stretch for Apple. Even in design the idea of going back to the Palm days with a stylus is impossible?